Food

Elina's house - open air cooking

The food here is good. I hopefully anticipated loosing about 10 pounds by coming to a third world country like when I traveled to Malaysia. Not true here in the capital of the Marshall Islands! As Chris noted, it is either fried or carb loaded. Out of the five adoptive families, two have had food poisoning and one is having trouble with the water. So far so good for us! I suppose it might just be a matter of time, but we are trying to be really careful.

Meals take a really long time. However, we look at it as “an event”. It is something we do each day and we spend an average of an hour and a half to two hours at each meal. We sit, relax and linger since there is no where to go.

We could order the exact same item every meal for the remaining five weeks and each time it would be prepared differently. If they are out of a cheese or a vegetable, etc, it just won’t come on it. Sometimes you order and get an entirely different meal than what you expected. We just smile and say Kommal tata (thank you very much). The staff in the restaurant’s work so hard and we are happy to try whatever they serve us.

The fresh baked bread here is delicious. We have enjoyed many peanut butter sandwiches in our room when we don’t feel like the restaurant “event”. We have had breakfast in the restaurant two times as a special treat. Otherwise we eat breakfast bars in the room and then put the wrappers and crumbs in a double sealed zip lock bag so we don’t attract more bugs. We really have a system going!

Our meals are quite different than Elina’s meals. We have not eaten at her house, but have taken her bags of rice and flour. She has a little hot plate in one corner of her house where they can heat up their rice. They have a pig in a crate that I am guessing they will eat sometime. They cook over an open fire in a large pot outside. Most days you can smell the smoke from cooking in her hair. We are hoping we will be able to eat with her at her house one day soon.